Images of naked Snapchat users reportedly hacked and posted to 4chan

More stolen pics of naked people on the internet? Yes, following the infamous "fappening", where images of nude celebrities were dumped onto the net, more explicit snaps have been reportedly posted to 4chan, this time of Snapchat users.

This has been called the "snappening" for obvious reasons, and involves the leakage of a massive quantity of pics drawn from some 200,000 Snapchat accounts, according to Venturebeat. Some 13GB of material is thought to be involved, with the leakers apparently intending to create a database to allow searching via username.

Snapchat has confirmed that a hack has occurred, but placed the blame firmly away from itself, and made it clear that its own servers weren't actually breached.

In a statement, the service said: "We can confirm that Snapchat's servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks. Snapchatters were victimised by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use precisely because they compromise our users' security."

It's thought, at least according to some reports, that the images may have been drawn from the third-party client SnapSave, which as the name suggests allows you to save out Snapchat images to keep.

Of course, in the end, it all comes back to the same advice that was given to celebrities with the fappening – if you're taking nude photos of yourself and sending or storing them anywhere online, you're risking the worst happening. And you certainly can't rely on a Snapchat image disappearing after a few seconds as it should do.

Some have called for Snapchat to take more responsibility here, but the reality is, there's never going to be a totally secure way to operate a service like Snapchat, and prevent third-parties from stepping in and providing means to circumvent the ephemeral aspect of the service.

Snapchat is doubtless concerned to make its position clear with the potential legal aspects here – the fappening was followed up by a $100 million (£62 million) lawsuit aimed at Google, with LA lawyer Marty Singer representing over a dozen celebrity victims in that case.